


Xenophage

by Fulgadrum



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Dying and Lots of It, Horror Elements, Inhuman Perception/Morality, Other, People-Eatin', Weird Virus-Monster-on-Virus-Monster Romance???
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-25 02:45:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 9,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12521200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fulgadrum/pseuds/Fulgadrum
Summary: He chased down his past, pulling the wriggling truth from unwilling minds. He shapes himself into a weapon. His identity is a fragile reconstruction, more shade than solid. Unbidden, a burgeoning empathy fills the gaps of his increasingly human personality.You seek your future, embracing your rebirth into abomination. The past is irrelevant. You are a predator in the truest sense; alien, canny, and efficient. Your concern is propagation. It is...generous,to call your affiliation with Alex Mercer "romantic."This hasn't discouraged Dana.





	1. Chapter 1

There are really only two ways to react to sudden violence. 

The first way is a fevered struggle, in the primitive style of wild animals. To fight back with every last desperate breath, no matter how futile. Spending their last moments thrashing, clawing, and biting, even as the predator’s teeth close around their throat. Blood spurting in a rhythm that weakens with every beat of their failing hearts. They go into the dark still twitching, eyes rolling madly in slick sockets. 

The second is the surrender of the disbelieving mind, a civilized incomprehension. To them, death is a thing that belongs to television, to aging relatives, to third world countries, to cattle. _This can’t be happening,_ they think, denying reality even as their life slips from them, as easily as water through cracked porcelain. Clouded eyes wide, unblinking. Lips parted, breath shallow, thoughts dull. Then, relief. 

The girl in the subway station, clutching in terror at her attacker’s forearm, is very much a creature that belongs to the latter category. Even as the man in the hood presses the knife to her throat, barking threats at the uniformed men with guns, there is not much room in her head for anything but inarticulate fear. She is slack in the man’s grip, pliant as he walks them backwards towards the platform. She does not scream. She looks back at her pile of textbooks stacked on the bench where she had been sitting just a minute ago, and quietly dissociates. She has class in two hours, she can’t be late, she’s already on thin ice with the professor. 

“I said _get back_ ,” the man screams, and the blade at her throat nicks her skin. She feels the blood soaking into her shirt before she registers the pain. Finally, the tears start, more of a biological response to stimuli than a recognition of her fate. The girl begins to shake, and the man’s grip around her middle tightens, his breath hot against her ear. 

Against the hooded man’s insistence, the gunmen continue to close in. The bright LED flashlights mounted on their rifles burn the girl’s eyes, and as she squints against the glare, the order is given to open fire. In quick succession— 

Blooming agony. 

The knife clatters against tile. 

Shattering glass. 

The man speaks, hateful, triumphant, diminished. 

She collapses, and he follows. 

Her mouth fills with viscous fluid. 

Darkness at the edge of her vision. 

The girl closes her eyes. 

Hours later, shut away in the cold and dark of a morgue freezer, what awakens is _you_.


	2. Chapter 2

It took a bit of blind fumbling to open the latch with your foot. All the while, you ran your hands up and down the haphazard stapling in your stomach and chest, the remnants of a rushed and unsentimental autopsy. It should have hurt, you knew. Just as the claustrophobic, pitch black enclosure should’ve frightened you, and the cold ought to sap at your strength. But aside from your confusion, you were practically comfortable—your lack of concern over these odd circumstances were rather more worrisome than the circumstances themselves. You took your time easing the long shelf out of the refrigerator, pushing at the freezing metal of the chamber walls. There was no need for undue haste. 

Whoever had taken you apart had seen no need to provide you with a courtesy sheet to preserve your modesty, so like a newborn, you emerged naked, disheveled, and filthy. Free of your prison, you sat up slowly. The room was small, sterile. A great deal warmer, as well. The colder air of the freezer condensed into mist as it wafted out. As your temperature increased, so too did your alertness. You flexed your hands, your eyes darting about, taking stock of your surroundings. 

A stainless steel dissection table stood under a bright lamp, still damp with blood—yours, perhaps? An upturned cart in the corner, instruments scattered across the floor and left where they fell. All in all, it appeared as though it had been vacated in a hurry. You could smell astringent human sweat in the air, a few hours old. You sniffed at the air, dead lungs swelling, and realized will dull surprise that this was the first time you had bothered to breathe since you had awoken. Whatever sense you were using to detect the past presence of two men… whatever is was, it was a sense not _unlike_ smell, but not smell. A method of perception you had no name for. 

You gripped the sides of the shelf to support yourself as you stood, your feet finding purchase on the tiled floor. It should’ve been difficult to stand after being crammed inside a freezer for a few hours, but your stance was stable, nearly graceful. It was indescribable. Moving under your own power filled you with… a kind of joy. You gleefully shifted your weight from foot to foot, enjoying the taunt-stretch-shift-pull in one leg, the loose-relax-slack-give of the other. 

Distracted by the sensation, you found yourself accidently crushing the metal of the shelf between your fingers. 

Blinking more for the effect than any real need, you let go of the twisted metal, running your fingers across the damage. Should you have been surprised? Somehow you weren’t—and there it was, again. Should’ve, should’ve, should’ve. There wasn’t much use in preconceptions if they were constantly being betrayed. There wasn’t much use in worrying about why you didn’t care about that, either. 

You pushed the damaged shelf back into the freezer and shut the door with a satisfying click. 

This was what it was. You were what you were. All that was left was figuring out what you wanted to do with that. 

What did you want? 

Clothes, for one. Though your memory was an amnestic haze concerning more personal details (a fact which really ought to be alarming you more than it is), your general understanding of the world and its practices was more substantial. People wear clothes. Though it would seem you don’t count among their number, it was instinctual that you to try and blend in. 

Your other desires were concerned with the pseudo-scents left in the room. You could smell the traces of people, their sweat and shed hair and particles of dead skin, and it stirred in you a _need_. Hunger? Close enough to it. As you were now, your body was a husk of dead matter so indistinguishable from a human corpse that a mortician couldn’t tell the difference. As strong as you seemed to be, your form lacked a certain _substantiality_. It could be more. 

You could be more. 

The other ‘scent’, and the reactions it caused, were altogether more difficult to quantify. The smell was like-you-but-not-you. Like-human-but-not-human. You _wanted_ it. That, too, might be described as a kind of hunger. 

Idly, you plucked out the staples along your torso, watching your skin reform after each tear. You dropped them one by one into a wastebasket, listening to the bits of metal plink against the bottom. It was pleasurable to remove them, these foreign things stuck inside your body. 

There were other, more distant noises down the hall. Shoes on linoleum, voices, papers shuffling, cloth swishing. There were people in the building. 

As you listened, it wasn’t hard to pick out those who were more isolated than the rest. 

You walked out of the room like a phantom, your footsteps silent and sure, almost gliding along the floor.


	3. Chapter 3

There are cameras behind opaque glass bubbles embedded in the walls and ceiling. Keeping to the shadows as best you can to avoid their gaze, you discover that your new senses have a heat-based detection component. On an almost subconscious level, you can sense it—the electricity running through the walls, hot water through pipes, men and women rushing about the halls of the complex like blood through an artery. Traversing the building becomes a simple matter of finesse, knowing when to duck behind a planter or into a doorframe, and where to move to elude detection. All the while, moving with intent towards the woman on the floor above, who was all alone. 

Not a smart idea, given that everyone else in the building seemed to be either scrambling or mobilizing. You would have thought that they had noticed your little excursion, and were panicking, but as far as you could tell this had been going on even before you woke up. 

A weedy man in a white coat turned the corner, his tall stack of files wobbling in his grip, and hurried on past the box of medical equipment you had tucked yourself into. His appearance fit with what you had seen of the building so far, which seemed to be largely composed of office space and laboratories. At least, on this floor. There were enough heavily-armed guards stomping about that you suspected some portion of the building was dedicated barracks. 

You had to pause again at the stairwell as one such group passed by, heading into the hall from where you had just come. Towards the morgue. 

Perhaps it was just coincidence, a routine sweep, but their urgency suggested otherwise. 

“Move it,” came a mechanically filtered voice, further distorted by echoes. The cement underside of the staircase was just empty space, save for yourself, and the sound carried. You could hear orders being issued from over a radio. 

“Check every room—see something nasty, you shoot it. An egghead gives you lip? Shoot ’em twice, just to make sure. Evac notice went up thirty minutes ago, they had their chance. Anyone not down in quarantine is suspect.” 

As the squad passed out of sight, you began to hear doors being kicked open, furniture upturned. 

Time to go. 

The woman was close by, just up the stairs and through a door. Starting to feel the pressure, you hurried on up. The hallway was more of the same, but—ah, there were windows on the far wall. It was nighttime outside. You could see the glow of streetlamps. Even more tantalizing, however… 

The woman in the office. 

You turned the handle of room 201 slowly and slipped inside, shutting it behind you with the mildest of clicks. It was a large space, filled with perhaps thirty cubicles. There were _people smells_ here in a way there hadn’t been, back in the hall, back in the morgue. Where their shoes had worn tracks into the carpet, where their hands had brushed into wall and left traces of skin oil and sweat and dead cells, where their bodies had pressed into the chairs, air held and expelled from dozens of sets of lungs, and shed hair sat trapped by computer fans and the wheels of rolling office chairs. But those people were long gone, phantom. 

_She_ was _here_. 

There in the second-from-the-last cubicle. 

Typing rapidly away at a phone’s keypad in a manner that suggested she had repeated the action so many times in the past hour that the action had being rote. 

The woman was so focused on her task she didn’t notice you walk up behind her. Didn’t see your reflection in her monitor, or hear your near-silent footsteps as you approached. Her eyes were locked to her phone, one hand on the receiver, the other typing 212-264— 

A spike emerged from your wrist, tapering to a needle point, brushing your palm. Driven by instinct but tempered by caution you swiftly covered her mouth. Using that same hand to press her head back and into your chest, you drove the needle upwards into her brain, through the skin between her lower jaw and throat. She jerked, once, shuddering in your grip, and then… 

You came apart at the seams, tendrils snaking around the woman’s body, pulling her in. 

It was nauseating. 

It was rapturous. 

Cell by cell, you split her up, allocating, shifting. Matter wound around matter, like steel-reinforced cables, a sinuous slurry woven into something stronger than any one strand. God, you were so _full. _So much more _whole_. You been broken before, not just diminished, but horrifyingly empty. __

__You understood that now._ _

__And just like that, it was over. At some point in the shuffle, you had transitioned into sitting in her chair. Sally Hernandez’s chair._ _

__This was her desk. This was _her_ body. She stared at her reflection, as if it was her first time seeing it. Big, brown eyes. Grandfather’s eyes. Her mother’s hair, too thin, prone to curling at the ends. Her son had inherited neither of these features. _ _

_Oh, god._

Oh, god, the level 5 breach. That walking biohazard was loose on the streets, out in the city where her son was. Damn it, damn _him_ , why wouldn’t he pick up the phone? 

She reached towards the keypad to try again, but 

You didn’t want to use the phone. 

No, no no no 

This was your best chance to escape. If they rounded you up for quarantine, even looking like this, it would only be a matter of time before you were discovered. 

Oh _god_ oh god it was _in her_

With a bit of effort, you suppressed her. She lingered at the edge of your mind, wailing. Hush, hush. It was like pacifying a crying baby. You had memories of crying babies, now. Of Johnathon, Sally’s son, all grown. And memories that were _much, much_ more interesting, more pertinent, more _familiar._

Memories of a scientist too close to the heart of this operation, here at Gentek. One of those geniuses, working up in the departments that you needed Level 3 Clearance to even be allowed to know they _exist_. 

Memories of one Alex Mercer.


	4. Chapter 4

Before she was Sally Hernandez, the woman you were currently wearing was called Sally Fredrickson. She married Mateo Hernandez in the 90’s, divorced him four years ago, and was newly engaged to a fellow named Richard Thomas. Her son didn't like him. This was a point of contention at home more often than not, and you could tell how the issue weighed on her. This knowledge was worthless to you, of course. You could probe Sally’s mind for as much information as you liked, as long as you could ignore her screaming—there really wasn’t anything she could do to withhold her thoughts from you, but sifting through her memories for specifics was proving difficult. It was all garbled, snatches of half-remembered conversation, impressions of sound and light. Your fingers twitched with the ghost sensation of running your hand through your son’s hair— _her_ son’s hair. And more you pulled her apart for answers, the less coherent her thoughts. Sally was decaying. 

Whether that was simply your inexperience, or there were certain limitations to your abilities, it was too early to tell. You spent the few seconds it took to gather up her coat and purse pondering this. Reluctantly, you gave up sifting around in her head for more details on Alex Mercer, one of a dozen other rumored boogeyman rumored to haunt the upper echelons of the science team. Sally had no personal experience with the man. Just secondhand accounts of a cold-eyed scientist, and whispers that he (along with the others working on his project) were being _disappeared_ by management. 

Perhaps, they said, even becoming victim to one of the very experiments he had helped perpetuate. 

Judging by… well, judging by your existence, at least some of the gossip about the company making monsters was true. It could be that the hearsay surrounding Mercer also had some element of truth to it. For supposedly top secret projects, the low level employees had a frighteningly complete grasp of what went on here behind closed doors. The rumor mill at Gentek was fearsome as the stories it circulated. 

Though if Sally had managed to catch wind of what was happening with the “early retirement” of scientists, there was no reason Mercer hadn’t caught on before it was too late. Your instincts said that Mercer, you, and the containment breach that had the facility abuzz were all related. Maybe that explained why you were so fixated on Mercer? If he had a hand in making you what you were… but Sally didn’t really know any details, and the more you looked, the more she came apart. She was so delicate in mind, as she had been in body. But even if she knew nothing about your condition or the man who may have had a hand in causing it, you could still get some use out of her. 

What she _did_ have experience with was Gentek’s stringent no-smoking policy, which required all employees not only to exit the building to catch a smoke on their lunch breaks, but also to cross walk at least a hundred feet away from the property. 

The company’s best kept secret wasn’t human experimentation, abduction, or even the hundreds of deaths Gentek cavalierly caused over the course of their viral exploration of the human genome. 

It was that the fire-only exit on the fourth floor had a broken alarm. 

You shut down Sally’s computer by inherited habit, and made your way there. 

...................

What few encounters you couldn’t avoid with your enhanced senses were easily circumvented by just striding confidently past. More than one armed patrol passed you by without questioning where you were headed or why you were out of quarantine, just because you didn’t carry yourself like someone who ought to submit to their authority. 

When you made it to the fourth floor, however, you were presented with a challenge of a different sort: a door that required level 2 clearance to open. Sally was only a level 1 employee. 

Perhaps you could’ve backtracked, gone digging around through desks and drawers, hoping someone left behind their card key in the evacuation rush. It struck you, though, that you weren’t exactly as _confined_ to the building’s standard geometry as its human occupants. There was a perfectly serviceable vent just four feet above you that would likely provide passage into the forbidden sector. 

Sally’s mind sputtered weakly at you. 

Too small. 

Too small? It was nearly a foot across, and four inches tall. More than adequate. 

At least, if you adjusted a little. Your form was shockingly malleable, considering your density and strength. The bones, especially the skull, might prove to be an issue… 

But then, they weren’t _really_ bones anymore, were they? Just cells affixed rigidly in place, to give the appearance of an internal skeleton. They were purely aesthetic. 

Part of your human costume. 

You reached for the vent, your arm elongating, thinning out. With a snap, you dug your fingers into the grate covering the vent, crushing them together into a makeshift handle. With a tug, the vent cover popped out of place—your body was so heavy now, you hadn’t even needed to shift your stance for leverage. You relaxed your hand, and the twisted grate fell to the floor with a crash. The sound echoed down the hall, and you knew you were being reckless, but impatience overrode your caution. Freedom was well in sight, you could afford to be a little careless. 

Pressing on, you felt around the inside of the vent. It was pull of dust and debris, dirt and dead skin cells. You reached up with your other hand and pulled yourself up, your body limp and malformed, like someone had taken a sledge hammer to every bone in your body. The noise it made as you coiled yourself inside the tiny metal passageway thrilled you, but disgusted Sally—like pressing your ear against someone’s cheek while they slowly chewed hard pretzel sticks, she supplied. A colorful description, but apt enough. 

You didn’t slither on. Instead, you used your arms, each still about five feet long, to pull yourself through. It was interesting how much you could hear—and it had seemed your stunt with the vent cover was beginning to attract attention. 

By the time they discovered the vent, however, you were well on the other side of the building. Deciding to forgo the fire exit, you instead located where the duct opened out into the street, disabling an intake fan as you passed through an even smaller opening. 

For the first time, you tasted the outside air. 

When you emerged from the building, you didn’t so much climb the wall down—you _poured_ , then reassembled from the pool of yourself after the four-story fall, no worse for the wear. Gentek had been a top-of-the-line facility, and they took care to keep the building as clean as possible. The world outside had no such compunctions, and you could smell _everything_. After those minutes inside, it was almost sensory overload. Somehow, though, you didn’t think your senses had an upper limit, and you were easily picking out something close to two million distinct individuals. 

Buffet, went Sally. You almost dismissed it as a non-sequitur, but _oh_. Oh, she was right, wasn’t she? Your hunger, barely suppressed before, roared back to the forefront of your mind. 

It was consuming. 

You pulled up the collar of your jacket and walked into the night.


	5. Chapter 5

Hungry, hungry, hungry. The part of you that was Sally was filled with nervous impatience. It was more important now than ever to keep a low profile. As soon as Gentek finished their headcount, they would discover they were short Sally Hernandez. This was a wanted woman. 

And so, it was a calculated and prudent decision to creep up behind a man who sat smoking in a deserted bus stop, under a broken street light, and lance your fingers into his spine. Your ribs splayed open, an un-zipping of flesh that carried on into your neck and face. Like a thresher, you formed blades from your internal mass and churned, pulling the man inside before he had time to scream. Euphoric, you carved from him until he was hollowed out, and then absorbed the mess. Sloppy, but satisfying. 

Headlights approached you from down the street. Your body knitted itself back together just as a bus pulled up with a hydraulic shriek. Bathed in the florescent lighting from the windows, you looked upon yourself. Strong, lithe hands bound up in warm brown skin. As an afterthought, you picked up the still-lit cigarette that had fallen to the ground, and placed it in your mouth. 

Hello, Malik Lewis. 

You allowed him to pilot you into the vehicle, content to sit back and think for a while. Another human consumed. More biomass to add to your strength. Curiously, you noted a slight shift in your general thought process, a vague malaise—looking back, a similar thing had occurred when you had absorbed Sally, hadn’t it? And spurned on by her urgency, you had taken a shortsighted risk… 

There would be no more of that. 

From this point you would have to police your thoughts more carefully. This was the learning process, you supposed. 

Malik swiped his bus pass, a bit of processed plastic you hadn’t been able to consume. The driver glared at him and the trail of smoke he trailed as he walked to an empty seat near the back, but Malik didn’t give a shit about that, and you were inclined to agree. With a shuddering creak, the bus lurched forward into the gloom. The city, all alight and towering, rolled by. 

Nighttime in Manhattan was no less active for the late hour. It bustled with people, full to bursting. Mites, eking out their living on a concrete colossus. For all of their mad scrambling for territory, mates, and resources, the species rather resembled a virus. Why, Malik knew a film quote to that very effect. _“Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed, and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area…”_

You felt a kind of kinship to this species, and not just for the superficial reason that you styled yourself in their image. You _respected_ humans. They understood the relationship between predator and prey, the hierarchical ladder of consumption at the top of which they had long stood. How could they fault you for ascending in their footsteps? Imitation was, after all, flattery. 

Their planet-wide predation was unsustainable, however. 

You would endeavor to do better. 

…………..

Four days later, you had managed to carry on without consuming another person. The pressure was, at times, intolerable. Somehow you managed to keep your appetite contained. You took cues from Malik’s extensive knowledge of the habits of horror movie slashers and police dramas. The last thing you wanted to do was draw attention to yourself. You may not leave a trail of bodies in your wake, but surely there were traces that Gentek could detect if you got careless. Impatience may well prove to be the _real _killer.__

__Not that you were feeling as anxious and impulsive, anymore._ _

__At some point, you realized Sally’s mind had ceased generating new thoughts—it was more of a greatest hits reel of her life, capping off with the few seconds of abject horror she had felt at the moment of her death. And, of course, the incessant screaming that always accompanied those whose consciousness you took. That part, you thought, may never fade._ _

__It was bizarre, but you sort of missed her company._ _

__You immersed yourself in distraction, watching news from Malik’s little old-fashioned television in his apartment. There was plenty going on, in the greater world. The CDC had issued a state of emergency in New York City, declaring Manhattan the center of a rising epidemic. Uniformed men, the likes of which you had seen in Gentek’s facilities, patrolled the “red zones” where the infected were thickest._ _

__Zombies, Malik insisted weakly, oddly terse. It was sad—you were worried he was starting to go, too. You could handle the quiet and solitude just fine, but you had grown used to his commentary. He had helped you nearly as much as Sally had. They had both been good kills._ _

__Maybe there would soon come a time that you didn’t _need_ to emulate the consciousness of the people you devoured to stave off loneliness. If there was one subject that the news was interested in almost as much as the plague emergency, it was the man with almost supernatural capabilities who seemed to be fighting Blackwatch as much as he fought the mutated infected. There was little more than blurry footage and eye-witness accounts, at this point, but they confirmed your suspicions. There was another like you. _ _

__That man, who appeared briefly onscreen, appearing to dropkick a helicopter—he was that strange scent from the morgue. You were almost _certain_ of it. _ _

__Now you just needed to find him._ _


	6. Chapter 6

On the day the military finally quarantined the Manhattan borough, establishing barricades on every bridge and barring passage onto or off of the island, there were two other events of great significance. Foremost was the arrival of the USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier capable of launching missile strikes. Codenamed the Citadel, the ship provided the recent arrival of US Marines a mobile, offshore command center. The fortress on water would be a boon to their efforts, for more reasons than its ability to rain death from above. The epidemic, you discovered, couldn’t traverse water—and neither could you, with any ease. Experimenting late one night in one of the ponds in the park had proved enlightening. You sank like a stone. Your body was simply too dense to float, and being fully submerged in liquid was physically unpleasant. If you _had_ to cross one of the rivers, you would select the thin Harlem river, to the north, where the banks were closest. An absolute last resort. 

The second discovery of import was that the Blackwatch unit, those uniformed men you had avoided in the Gentek facility, were in possession of machines that could detect your presence. You had passed by one of their outposts as Malik and nearly brought down a strike team on your head as the Marines stationed there panicked over the proximity alarm sounding. 

Curiously, these machines could also detect the general infected. 

The parallels between the infected swarms (which now numbered over 15% of the population of the city, by your estimate) and your own condition weren’t lost on you. Nor was the significance of the timing of your breakout and the start of the outbreak, events too close together to be a coincidence. The thought had occurred to you that it was _your_ fault, that you were some kind of vector spreading the disease about unknowingly… but you would sooner lay the blame at Gentek’s feet. There was a link between yourself and the virus, that much was clear, but you were _not the same_ as those unfortunates. If you were a sort of conscious virus made of shifting biomass, then the “infected” were just that—people infected with a virus, albeit a virus that seemed to biologically reconstruct those suffering under it. 

As different as a tree and a person affixed with a prosthetic wooden leg. 

The distinction was important. 

If they were getting infected with whatever _you_ were, it follows that they’d be stalking the streets and stealthily absorbing people, not running about mindlessly, biting and clawing at each other. 

Besides, you suspected whatever strain you were was inert, somehow. You had done some preliminary testing. The virus had a minuscule incubation period, and purposefully exposing yourself to humans over the course of an entire had yielded no results. There was only one way you could "infect" people, and that was by consuming them. 

The connection between yourself and the virus infecting was not the obvious conclusion, but something rather more subtle. 

Third in this line of discoveries was one that was really only important to you. 

You had a code name. Hera. Queen of the gods in the Greek pantheon, goddess of motherhood and birth. It was a pretentious appellation, but the fact that a relatively low-ranking officer had such a sensitive piece of information divulged to him proved that Gentek (and by extension, Blackwatch Special Forces and the Marines) were all actively searching for you. This was information you had received from Sergeant Walter Sanders, the mask you had donned as you eluded Blackwatch after setting off their detector, and whose appearence you had quickly discarded after you escaped. 

That those organizations were looking for you wasn’t surprising. Yours hadn’t been the subtlest breakout, considering the property damage, and that you had consumed an employee right out from under them. What was _exciting_ was the tidbit you had learned about your counterpart. 

Where news reports showed the same blurry cellphone camera recordings and distant still shots, the military and Blackwatch had a much greater wealth of information on him. From what intelligence they had gathered, he was actively hunting down people who had connections to Gentek. Scientists, staff, officials, soldiers—he gathered information from them in much the same manner you did, albeit with an obsessive focus on one particular topic. His capabilities were fearsome. He could bring all manners of hell down on the unsuspecting with little provocation. Form weapons from his limbs. Run at speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour. Scale buildings in seconds, either by leaping over them or by literally running up the walls. Infiltrate any level of any organization, even Blackwatch, easily, at least for a while. Take damage without flinching, up to grenade launchers and machine gun fire. 

Your tentative experimentation had revealed you could replicate many of these feats, but not all. And as it was, you had learned there were abilities _you_ possessed that he was not, at the very least, on record as being capable of performing. 

His war on Blackwatch and the infected hoards alike was making it more and difficult to lay low, especially as his enemies escalated their efforts to contain him. The virus detectors had been an unpleasant discovery, and Blackwatch was erecting more of them every day. 

You could hardly fault him for seeking answers to your shared predicament, though you believed his priorities were somewhat skewed. Certainly his methods were a bit more bombastic than necessary. This wasn’t enough to dissuade you seeking him out, however. It helped to know you were much more durable than you previously believed. That fact put you in a better position to make bigger gambles, and opened up your opportunities a great deal. 

If possible, you would thank him in person for this. 

They called him Zeus, a title you appreciated no more than you did Hera, but it would do. 

For now. 

Blackwatch had plans in the coming days to deploy mobile scanners to try and narrow down wherever Zeus was nesting. You imagined Zeus would catch wind of their intentions before long, but likely not before Blackwatch greatly narrowed down your search area for you. 

Avoiding detection yourself would be a chore at worst and a great danger at best, but you already had a few ideas on how to circumvent the problem. Ideas that Blackwatch’s profile on Zeus suggested were too subtle to occur to him, not that you could trust them to fairly judge his character. But even just based on what you objectively knew of him, it was doubtful he would come up with your method in time to avoid Blackwatch’s raid. 

If you used your abilities like a scalpel, Zeus wielded his like a hammer. 

Blackwatch would lead you to him. And then, after he summarily obliterated them in his usual style? 

You would make contact.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy halloween!! i hope you had a spooky day
> 
> this chapter is exposition and planning, the spookiest things of all (?)


	7. Chapter 7

Sally Hernandez. Malik Lewis. Walter Sanders. 

Snatched out of their lives and thrust into _yours_ because they’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Targets of convenience, and nothing more. 

NYPD Officer Blaine Kelly was different. He had the distinction of being your very first premeditated murder, if you could call what you did “killing” in any real sense. 

You wanted Blaine for a reason. It wasn’t anything about him as an individual. Rather, you were after the equipment his job (beat cop) gave him access to—a police scanner and a cruiser. The last necessary tool for your plan, duct tape, had been procured at a Walgreens on 2nd Avenue, along with a lightbulb and a canned coffee. You paid with cash to avoid the credit trail, and used Walter’s body in Malik’s plainclothes to dodge recognition. 

It was overkill, in your opinion, but Blaine’s mind was overly cautious and Walter’s was borderline paranoid. In any case, whatever precautions it took to assuage their fears would likely be time well spent, considering your objective for today. 

Tail Blackwatch. Locate Zeus. 

Don’t get flattened by either of them in the interim. That might prove more of a challenge than anything—neither party played nicely or avoided collateral damage. 

In an abandoned parking garage, dark from a nearby power outage (and thus unmonitored by camera), with your roll of duct tape, you sealed yourself inside of the police cruiser. You taped around the doors and windows, over the air conditioner ducts. Any opening through which air could enter or escape was now blocked. With any luck, if you kept your distance from the mobile viral detector units, this would be enough to elude their radar. If Walter’s intel was correct, those things could pick up viral matter from the air in the range of one parts per million. With sensitivity that high, you imagined that the detectors tended to generate some amount of false positives. 

All of this should be enough to keep you safe under Blackwatch’s radar until Zeus appeared. 

The interesting part would be making sense of Blackwatch’s communications. This was where the police scanner came in. 

A police scanner was an interesting bit of technology. It operated in the range of VHF to UHF, and could pick up dozens more frequencies than your average radio. Decrypting the military’s communications channel wasn’t a herculean task, considering you still had some of Walter’s equipment and all of his knowhow. In the end, setting the scanner up to intercept Blackwatch transmissions took two hours, three screwdrivers, one online tutorial, and a bit of patience. 

_“—this is Bravo Team, headed down Broadway, no activity. Over.”_

_“Echo Team Comms Officer. We’ve located a hive on 27th and 10th Avenue, moving in to engage, requesting support.”_

_“Roger that, Echo. Strike team inbound, over.”_

_“Uh, this is Delta Team? We’re picking something up in the Battery Park City residential area?”_

You’d been thinking this a lot lately, but you loved humans. They made such wonderful toys. 

With the turn of a key, you started the car. 

…………..

As it happened, the roads surrounding the Blackwatch teams were largely clear. Most people tended to drive _away_ from groups of special ops soldiers, armed to the teeth and operating tanks. The drone itself, carrying its payload of viral detector, was flanked by helicopters. And this was one of a dozen patrols, and overall less than a percent of the might Blackwatch could bring to bear. 

What did that say about Zeus, that he was single-handedly a match for them? 

No wonder the city was running in the other direction. 

It was easier to pay attention to their scattered chatter without having to deal with traffic, but that meant you had to drive a few streets parallel to their patrol and a block behind if you wanted to avoid drawing suspicion. 

_“Sniffer down, sniffer down! It’s Zeus, that thing is_ here.” 

There came the sound of scattered machine gun fire from several frequencies. 

_“Status, Delta? What’s happening with the target?”_

_“Aim for the central mass—”_

_“Captain, I—”_

_“No! No!"_

One by one, the signals went dead. You turned the volume up, trying to make sense of the pandemonium as you feigned drinking the can of iced coffee, the contents of which you had poured onto the floor of the parking garage hours before. Then, in your peripheral vision, a flash of movement. 

In a second, it was upon you. Zeus. 

He tore down the side street away what was left of Delta patrol, literally ripping up chunks of concrete and asphalt in his wake. Was that how he did it? Anchoring himself to the ground with biomass, for extra traction— 

There wasn’t time to ponder the mechanics of his speed before he hurtled himself over a parked truck and landed squarely on your engine block, sinking into the hood of your police cruiser to the very pavement below, before bounding off in the vague direction of Echo team. The car shook, bouncing on the two back tires that _hadn’t_ been unceremoniously crushed. 

You crawled out through the busted windshield, glass shards popping out of your body and dropping to the street, and stared after him, just the slightest bit star struck. For all of Zeus’s wanton destruction, the feeling you got from him was… well, it was… 

It reassured you that you were making the correct choice. 

His smell, like you, but not you. Zeus was an ally. You knew this on an instinctual level. A _biological_ level. 

With a vacant little smile, you walked towards the wreckage of Delta Team. The first of the patrols Zeus had targeted, and likely, the ones who had gotten closest to his nest. Your ride was totaled, so you were moving the plan forward a little earlier than anticipated. That was fine. 

You made your way through the devastation. The smoking remains of heavy terrain vehicles and armored tanks. Shouldering craters where helicopters had spun out of the sky and shattered against the earth. Corpses twisted up on the ground—those who had died before they could be consumed. You wondered if, in their last moments, they had thought they were the lucky ones. 

Zeus’s scent was so fresh here that it was difficult to pick up an older trails he might have left behind. The orientation of the remains of Delta Team gave you a pretty good idea of Zeus’s angle of approach, however, and from there it was only a matter of winding through the streets until you picked up his scent. 

Half an hour later, you found yourself looking up at a dingy apartment complex, barely more than a tenement. Zeus came by here often, you were certain—by way of rooftop, you sensed, not street. It explained your difficulty in finding him before now. It explained _Blackwatch’s_ difficult in finding him before now. 

Unsure, you pressed a foot against the concrete wall of the apartment building and sank in your tendrils. A quick tug or two, a slight adjustment of grip, and you were on your way up. Humans were built for a certain application of gravity, in the same way that deep sea fish were accustomed to high levels of pressure—it would seem this limitation had not been extended to you, because you were scaling the wall with no trouble. It was even easier if you built up a bit of momentum. Soon, you were running up the side of the building as fast as you could, devil-may-care. 

You could admit, you were beginning to see the appeal of his conspicuous methods of travel. This felt good. It was perhaps the most you had tested yourself since you had escaped Gentek. Of course, Blackwatch hadn’t blown up most of the city looking for _you_ , so that was one strike against lack of subtlety. Something to discuss, when he came home? 

With a flourish, you hopped from wall to the rooftop, spinning on your heel with the joy of movement. From your senses, you could tell he spent much of his time on this roof. There was scuffing in the scattered gravel, marks where he had clipped a wall or tile. He was _impressed_ upon this place, like he had been on the steel slab in the morgue. You practically vibrated with anticipation. 

Oh, what did you say, in a circumstance like this? You wished Sally hadn’t deteriorated so quickly—you felt like she would know. 

Speaking of, she was a friendlier face to wear than that of a forty year old cop. You shifted into Sally and tucked some errant hair behind your ear, then walked over to the roof access door. 

Zeus had yet to return, so you didn’t expect it to open. 

“Alex? You’re back already?” 

It was a human girl with short, shaggy hair, and big luminous blue eyes. She smelled like Zeus, so much so it had masked her “food” scent. 

“Oh,” you said, dully. “Hello there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little more than usual because i missed yesterday!! aaaaa
> 
> i started replaying prototype to reconnect with the plot and forgot how batshit hard the levels get. and also, all cutscenes are about 15 seconds long, like they are desperate to get them over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to Fucking Stuff Up. probably a budget thing??
> 
> it's silly but good fun


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> something actually happens in this one, woooooooah

“So, uh, can I get you anything?” the girl asked, gesturing vaguely at the mini fridge with her pistol. “We've got… coffee, water… actually it’s _just_ coffee and water. And creamer. The powdered kind.” 

Only half-listening, you peered around the room, which had at some point been converted into some sort of _hacker den_ from the rooftop access storage room it had so clearly been—there was a shelf pushed back against a wall that still held cans of spackle, spare bricks, and pesticide. Bare plaster walls shone dully under the single florescent ceiling fixture, the neon of a laptop screen, and the yellow glow of the desk lamp. Windowless, poorly ventilated. The fold-out chair you were sitting on groaned ominously under your weight. Your host tightened her grip on her gun at the noise, perhaps reminded that although you may have looked like a 120lb woman, the reality was somewhat more alarming. Or maybe she was just jumpy. Hard to tell. 

It’d be easier if you could just crack open her head and scoop all her secrets out, but you suspected Zeus wouldn’t take kindly to you consuming the girl claiming to be his sister. That was rough ground to forge a partnership on, even if you didn’t really understand his attachment to this woman. 

If you were him, you would have eaten her _ages_ ago, for safe-keeping more than anything. Humans were fragile creatures. 

“I don’t need to drink anymore, actually,” you finally replied. That might have been the wrong thing to say, because the girl swallowed heavily and sort of collapsed backwards into her computer chair, raking her fingers through her short, choppy hair with her unoccupied hand. 

“Rrright.” 

Her computer beeped behind her, and though her eyes darted back toward it, she didn’t seem to want to turn her back to you. Good instincts. Not that she could’ve stopped you if you wanted to hurt her, obviously. One gun wasn’t enough. _Ten_ guns wasn’t enough. The distance between the two of you was just a few feet. You could form a spike, and cover the gap in fractions of a second. Or weave a tendril up through the cabling on the ground, and quietly wind it around her throat. Produce carbon monoxide, or a basic alkali corrosive mist, and release it into the enclosed space. 

Frightening, how tenuous your grip on self-control was when presented with an easy meal. 

You watched her watching you watch her, in unbroken silence. For her sake, more than yours, you tried to make small talk. 

She said her name was Dana, right? 

“Dana. Your heartbeat is picking up.” 

The girl flinched, and you heard the click of the pistol’s safety mechanism. 

“Worse now,” you added, as her pulse thudded in your ears, a siren’s call to feast. 

“Okay, you know what? Don’t do that,” Dana said, her voice hitching. 

“Do what?” 

“That whole,” she shook her hand at you, first at your head, and then in a kind of deflective arc in front of her. “ _Alien_ shtick. The not blinking, or breathing. The creepy comments.” 

You took a breath, and blinked a few times. 

“Yeah, no, not helping. I know you’re faking it. God, you’re even worse than my brother. He at least remembers to breathe.” At the thought of her brother, she seemed to withdraw into herself a little, the threat you presented and her upset at your behavior momentarily tabled. 

Idly, you matched your breathing to her rhythm, trying to ingrain the motion to muscle memory. Such an obvious tell… you really needed to spend more time around people, because your mimicry began to lack when you couldn’t compensate for your shortcomings by hitching off the brain of a freshly-consumed human. It was just so much _easier_ to have a human mind floating around in you, with all their knowledge and emotion, even if it wasn’t particularly helpful. You didn’t feel so… incomplete, then. But they only lasted hours, days at most, before they lost whatever spark of real consciousness they had and completely integrated. You tore them up, the same as you did their bodies. Why couldn’t you just keep them? Maybe you weren’t trying hard enough. Maybe you just needed more practice. 

…you were so _hungry._ Your chest rose and fell in lockstep with Dana’s. 

“Zeus,” you said. 

“I told you,” she said, annoyed. “His name is Alex.” 

“Sorry.” 

“It’s whatever. It’s fine. Listen… just chill out, okay? He should be back soon.” 

With that, she swiveled around in her chair, either pacified by your attempts to appease her, or more likely, simply too exhausted to bother keeping watch any more. Silhouetted against her screen, Dana’s shadow typed rapidly away at the keyboard. It was impressive. How many words per minute did that add up to? She was gifted with computers. You could really that skill… 

No, no. You weren’t a thrall to your own biology. Not like those simpleminded infected. You wouldn’t ruin everything by turning your only potential ally against you. 

To suppress your hunger, you tried to keep yourself occupied. You read all the labels on all the objects in the room, counted every tile on the floor, and experimented with transmuting chemicals inside your body. Attempts to plan what you would say to Zeu— Alex, when he showed up, ended largely in failure. You didn’t have the language to really articulate what you wanted from him, nor could you guess at how he would react to find you here in his sister’s hideaway. It was simpler when Dana hadn’t been a factor. 

She glanced back at you. 

“Are— are you staring at me? Jesus Christ, what did I _say?_ ” 

“I’m sorry,” you said, again. 

Dana muttered to herself, but you could hear every word. _How am I supposed to concentrate like this?_

She picked up her gun from its place on her desk and rolled over to you in her desk chair. 

“Since _I’m_ obviously not getting any work done, let’s talk.” You watched her face, one eyebrow creeping upwards, and then understood you were meant to acknowledge what she had just said. 

You nodded, belated. 

“Great. Okay. Maybe this kind of thing should wait until Alex gets here, but let’s start by sharing what we know. You first.” 

That was sensible. 

“Several days ago, coinciding with the start of the outbreak, I woke up in in a morgue.” If ‘waking up’ was the correct term. Rebirth might have been closer. Or resurrection? 

Dana’s eyes narrowed, a gleam of understanding lighting them. You could almost see the pieces coming together in her head. 

“Just like Alex. Let me guess, Gentek?” 

“Yes. I had no… personal memory, but most of my ‘generic’ memory. Enough to know I was different. Changed. The facility was in lockdown, and…your brother… had already fled. The staff and Blackwatch were on high alert. I managed to steal a bit of information from them. Nothing particularly concrete, but I gathered that there was another person like me they were chasing, and one of the names of someone in a top secret department. Alex. Alex Mercer. Am I correct in assuming…?” 

Dana nodded, her face grave. 

“That’s Alex. My Alex. He started working for Gentek maybe five or six years ago, and I moved to New York a bit after that. It wasn’t until of few weeks ago that we reconnected, though. He sent me a laptop out of nowhere, with all kinds of classified information on the hard drive. I couldn’t really make sense of some of it. All tied up in code-words and jargon, you know. But whatever was happening at that company, I could tell it was bad news.” 

Left unsaid was just how bad the news had turned out to be. Deadly viruses. Infected rampaging in the streets. Military-enforced quarantine of Manhattan island. 

And, of course, what had happened to her brother. 

“From my short time there, I discovered rumors that Gentek was ‘retiring’ their head researchers. What exactly they were working on was sensitive, proprietary information, but according to the gossip, may have involved some level of human experimentation. From what I heard, it sounded as though it wouldn’t have been out of the question for the scientists to have become subjects in their own virology program. A neat and tidy solution, if Gentek really is that corrupt. Even the low level staff didn’t have a great opinion of the company,” you told her. 

She gave you a skeptical look. 

“That fits with what I know about Gentek… and don’t get me wrong, but you managed to find all that out in, what, a few hours? When the whole place was on high alert?” 

“Closer to twenty-eight minutes.” Give or take. 

“Really,” she said, flatly. 

“The way my body had changed, I had skills that were uniquely suited to evading capture and information gathering. I assume you know what I’m talking about.” 

If Alex hadn’t told her everything, you would avoid specifics where possible. You didn’t want to alarm Dana, and more pressingly, you were endeavoring to give Alex no reason to form a grudge against you. 

“…some,” she said. You were getting the feeling she didn’t want to admit just how little her brother was telling her. 

“Think of it in these terms. We—that is, Alex and I—have a greater degree of control over our biology than most organisms,” you said, hoping that was appropriately vague, but no so lacking in detail that Dana would think you were holding out on her. “You can see how that would be useful.” 

You guessed Dana hadn’t been watching a lot of television, holed up in this room. Or if she had, none of it had been the local news. 

“Yeah, I can see how it would,” she said, clearly uncomfortable. “But you make it sound like… I don’t know, like you aren’t human anymore.” 

There was no way to handle this delicately, was there? It probably would have been better to deflect, or lie, but for some reason… you wanted someone to understand. Dana was the first person outside of your head that you’d spoken more than five words to since you had come into existence. The situation with her brother was probably the same. Didn’t she deserve to know? 

Alex would just have to forgive you. 

“…there is no… continuity, between whatever presumable experiment turned the ‘human me’ into this, and my coming into consciousness. As far as I’m concerned, whoever it was that died that night, whoever it was that Gentek cut up on that table… that was someone else. A stranger.” 

“That doesn’t mean you aren’t _human_. And I don’t think, I don’t think that having amnesia means the old you died,” Dana said, voice raised, her hand tight around her pistol. 

“My connection to the human experience is tenuous at best. To be honest, I think you already know that. Something about me registers as _off_ to you. You called it my ‘alien shtick,’ trying to diffuse your unease with humor, but that’s an accurate enough summation. The relationship between myself and who you call the ‘old me’ is more akin to a wasp larva incubating within a caterpillar than to a metamorphosis.” 

“I don’t believe that,” she spat, pulling her feet onto her hair and hugging her knees. It made her look like a little girl. “You’re just making guesses. Working from incomplete information.” 

It dawned on you at last just why she was so vehemently denying your inhuman nature. 

You tilted your head to one side, stopped your breathing, and gazed at her unblinking. 

“Are you saying that because that’s what you really believe? Or just because of what it would change between you and your ‘brother’?” 

“I think,” she said, her hair now shading her eyes from view, “That you should shut up.” 

You complied, and committed the girl’s expression and gestures to memory. Even if you couldn’t consume her for her skills, even if you hadn’t really learned anything new from your conversation (merely confirmed some things you already suspected), you were determined to get some use out of her. 

Naturally, Alex chose that moment to open the door and stride inside. In the same movement, he shifted his arm into a four foot knife. The razor edge glinted in the light—was that what how he used the trace metals he absorbed? He peered into the room from underneath a grey hood, ash-colored eyes fixed on you. Your danger sense was keening like a siren, and under the layer you had designated as skin, your insides were shifting in preparation. 

Like she was operating in an altogether slower reality, Dana turned in her chair, her blue eyes wet. Alex’s eyes went from her defensive posture, to the gun she was holding loosely in her hand, to you. 

“Alex—” she started, and he sprung forward, grabbing the back of her shirt and throwing her behind him. 

You had hoped to avoid this. 

Oh well.

Alex shot toward you, putting his entire body into a swing that would’ve cleaved anyone else in half. The blow was so heavily telegraphed that you had plenty of time to avoid it, twisting your body (which was now multi-segmented) around his blade arm and skittered backwards up the wall. _That_ got a reaction from him—a brief open-mouthed stare that quickly transformed into a scowl, his resting expression. If he hadn’t known what you were before, he sure as hell did now. You got a glimpse of dark, mussed hair from underneath his hood as he wrenched his arm out of the wall, and you took the chance to shift the ends of each of your limbs into blades of your own, wicked and serrated, bent and articulated like the forearms of a praying mantis. Sharp, but not gilded with metal. You had no idea how he was pulling off that particular trick. 

With a grunt of exertion, Alex whipped his arm blade like a band of elastic, gouging once, twice, three times into the furniture where you had been a moment before, always milliseconds too slow to catch you. Your previous observation, that he was rather uncreative with the use his abilities, seemed to hold true. With every miss, he just seemed to get _angrier_. 

For your part, well, you were honestly kind of having fun. 

Then Dana was at the door, screaming, one arm around her ribs. The other, still holding her pistol, was trained indistinctly on the ongoing conflict within the tattered remains of her safe house. 

“Alex, what the fuck. What the FUCK.” 

Maybe it was the gun in her hand, pressing the button in his head that said ‘enemy’. Maybe it was just the unexpected noise, or the movement in his peripheral vision. Regardless, operating on reflex alone, he slashed at Dana. 

And you, manipulative and calculating, saw your opportunity to ingratiate yourself to them. 

You uncoiled like a spring, spreading out like a spider in the door frame, and interposed your body between Alex and Dana. At the same time Alex sliced through your entire left arm and most of your upper torso, including your head, Dana shot you in the back. Gore splashed against the plaster. You collapsed to the floor, crumpled in a twitching heap, but rose shakily and sightless to ward off any further attacks in Dana’s direction. It was a pitiful display, even as you slowly began to reform. That was, of course, the point. 

By the time one of your eyes was healed enough to use, however, Alex had clearly backed off. His stance was still confrontational, but at some point after nearly bisecting you with it, he’d lost the knife arm. If you were reading him correctly, he’d also had the dawning realization that for all your strangeness and dodging about, you hadn’t actually made a move to harm either of them. 

“Oh, shit,” said Dana. You heard the gun clatter to the ground behind you. 

What was the phrase? 

Hook, line, and sinker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fight, fight, fight
> 
> dana is the emotional cornerstone of them game. alex's attachment to her is basically his sole redeeming feature for the vast majority of it, and the impetus for him actually becoming something of a hero by the end.
> 
> then the second game undoes all his character development, but let's not talk about _that_

**Author's Note:**

> trying to get back in the swing of things. seeing if i can write a little bit every day, publishing the snippet as soon as i finish. build up some of the ol' momentum. it's not polished but it's an interesting exercise. consider it a halloween thing.
> 
> this fic is so "only appeals to the author" it kind of tickles me. i feel like most people wanna date the monster, but i always kinda wanted to BE the monster?? that's where this is coming from. if the premise doesn't turn you off completely, then hey. welcome. i pull up a chair for you by the fireplace, and offer you a frothing mug of [FAVORITE DRINK].


End file.
